Upgrading to Windows 7

I have installed Windows 7 Ultimate on my Dell Inspiron 6400 notebook on Saturday (24 October). I was previously using Windows XP Professional on the notebook.

If your Windows XP computer is working fine, there is truly no compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 7. In reality, most of us use applications, and these applications will run fine on Windows XP. There isn't really any Windows 7 specific application out there either, so there is really no pressing need to use Windows 7 in place of Windows XP.

And indeed, if you are using Windows XP, Microsoft does not provide any way to upgrade from it to Windows 7. The only way I could install Windows 7 is through a clean install, and to then migrate all my data files to the new operating system. You would think that since Microsoft has priced their operating system so expensively (Windows 7 Ultimate upgrade price = S$379, Retail price = S$549), an upgrade option would be offered. But NO!

So why did I bothered? Well, there were a few reasons:

• My Windows XP operating system was corrupted. There were several applications that I cannot click to execute, but have to right-click and execute using "Run As Administrator". And despite repairing the system files via re-installing Windows XP, the corruption could not be repaired. To permanently fix this required installing a fresh copy of Windows XP, and if I needed to do that, I might as well do a fresh install of Windows 7.
• I was running the 32-bit version of Windows XP. However, a 32-bit operating system can only address a maximum of 4 GB of RAM memory. Nowadays, RAM memory is extremely cheap. Some PC motherboards can easily accommodate up to 12 GB of RAM (6 pieces of 2GB RAM modules). In the near future, most PCs would come with 8 GB of RAM as standard, and such systems would need a 64-bit operating system.
  I thus installed the 64-bit version of Windows 7 to future-proof my installation.
  However, a lot of hardware drivers are not available in 64-bit versions. Thus, when one switches to a 64-bit operating system, a lot of legacy hardware may be rendered useless if the manufacture did not provide an appropriate 64-bit driver.
  Windows XP is actually available in a 64-bit version too. However, 64-bit Windows XP is plagued with the same lack of drivers problem, in fact, even more so than 64-bit Windows 7, because most hardware vendors are simply writing new 64-bit drivers for Windows 7 and not for Windows XP.
  And Microsoft has reduce the pain somewhat of missing 64-bit drivers because in Windows 7, they have provided a feature called "XP Mode", which is a virtual machine running Windows XP 32-bit. Programs that could not run in the 64-bit Windows 7 host system can always be run in the 32-bit XP virtual machine.
  In fact, I was pleasantly surprised that even my 10 year old USB TV tuner that had just XP 32-bit drivers, and thus could not be installed on the 64-bit Windows 7 host, could actually be installed in the XP virtual machine and run fine within the virtual machine environment. That was quite remarkable.
• I have been using Windows XP since 2001, and I was getting tired of the Windows XP interface.
  Windows Vista was disappointing because of software compatibility issues, and high resource requirements (Vista was just plain slow), which was why I reverted back to XP after a few weeks with Vista. (I actually installed Vista back in 2007 in "dual boot" mode. I found that there were so many software compatibility issues I always had to use the XP operating system. After a while, I wiped out the Vista "dual boot" partition to free up more disk space for Windows XP.) Thus, I didn't really get to use the Windows Vista user interface much.
  The Windows 7 user interface, being similar to Vista, is not really that fantastic to justify its exorbitant price (it would have been excellent if Windows 7 wasn't so expensive). However, at least Windows 7 is not as slow as Vista, and the compatibility issue has been deftly handled with "XP Mode" in Windows 7.

So, using the Windows 7 interface was refreshing. It sort of made computing fun again.

In fact, there are some nice things about the Windows 7 interface:

• The new Taskbar, which allows you to preview and choose which window to bring to the top (if you have many programs running), is well done. This feature is called Aero Peek.
• The system tray is more organised.
• There are some window actions that are pretty useful (eg. smart-resize when pulling the title bar from full screen, flipping a window to the left or right of the screen)
• There are of course some good Vista features (directory crumbs, integrated search box in the Start menu) that are now available instead of having to use 3rd party tools to accomplish them.

My opinion is that if you are buying a new PC or a new notebook, you should get it with Windows 7. There is no point buying a new PC and tag it with the ancient Windows XP interface.

However, don't bother spending S$379 (upgrade) or $549 (retail) for Windows 7 to upgrade your existing copy of Windows XP. That money is simply too expensive for an operating system. Microsoft can charge this kind of money because they are a monopoly. There is really no point making Microsoft richer than they already are.